In consultations with scholars at my institution, I have regularly noticed that updating citations in Zotero can be very slow when using Microsoft Word on macOS. For larger documents, such as a PhD thesis, the process can take a considerable amount of time, potentially 10–20 minutes, although I have not measured this precisely.

These performance issues with Word have been reported several times in this forum. My understanding is that the problem is related to Word’s API rather than to Zotero itself.

I am aware of the recommendation to disable automatic citation updates, but even with this setting disabled, inserting a new citation can still take a long time.

I currently don’t have a test document to investigate this further, and I don’t have access to a Mac myself. I’m therefore wondering whether LibreOffice might offer better performance than Word when used with Zotero on macOS, particularly when working with large documents containing many citations.

Does LibreOffice perform better in this regard, or are similar performance issues also present when using Zotero with LibreOffice on macOS?

I’m asking not only out of curiosity, but also because I’d like to make informed recommendations in future consultations with scholars at my institution. Ideally, I’d like to recommend a setup that helps users avoid these performance issues in the first place, particularly when they are starting a large project such as a PhD thesis. If LibreOffice offers a more reliable experience, it would be useful to know whether it is worth recommending as an alternative to Word.